Army will not meet its 2018 recruitment goal

Six months into the recruiting year, the U.S. Army is struggling to meet its recruiting goal, and is lowering that number goal as a result, the Association Press reports.

According to the article, the original plan was to recruit 80,000 active duty soldiers, but the service has only brought in 28,000 new soldiers thus far so the new goal is 76,500.

The struggle to meet this year’s recruiting numbers is in part due to a stronger economy, increased competition from the private sector that offers higher pay, and the strict physical requirements that many young people cannot meet, the report notes, adding that even with the lower number of new recruits, retaining service members has been more successful than in previous years.

Reader comments

Mon, Apr 30, 2018

the draft never really works it puts people in uniform that think someone else should do the door entry because they might get shot. it is not the wanna be heroes or the cya crowd that you need but the work hard and expect to get to play hard after the word is done crowd you to select people who might be able to the job to telling people we sell crafts not people lives to other countries.

Mon, Apr 23, 2018

That's because the U.S Army Recruiting Command went away from individual mandated missions per recruiter resulting in lack luster recruiting work ethic. They will need to revisit past policies in order to achieve future recruiting goals.

Mon, Apr 23, 2018
CRAIG

Wow, nice, so at my job, if I am not going to meet my goals, I can just lower the goal? LMAO I wonder if that works for standards on the PT Test? It didn't when I was there.

Mon, Apr 23, 2018
Jay Phelan
NJ

A second reason for bringing back the draft - The first and best reason would be to have universal service so a complete cross section of America can share in its defense as well as learn to get along with each other

Mon, Apr 23, 2018
William Wafff

Having recently retired after almost 40 years in the US Army, I am curious as to what country's Army is represented in the photo. It is definitely NOT the US Army, for that matter, and of the branches of the US Armed Forces. If writing a story about US forces, it might be helpful to have a photo of, well, the US branch of service being discussed, in this case, the Army.

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